


Breathe

by entanglednow



Category: Primeval
Genre: Blood, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-03
Updated: 2008-11-03
Packaged: 2017-11-07 06:43:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His shoulder thuds into a locker, tips him sideways, and leaves the grey surface spattered with red.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe

The gun clatters to the floor, and Nick doesn't know, doesn't care, whether he made it secure. Like Captain Ryan has dutifully show him how to do a dozen times. He leaves it on the tiles, trails gruesome sludge-like footprints of shocking red into the locker room, hands trying to catch, to open, every soaked piece of clothing he's wearing.

His fingers keep slipping on the clips, leaving smears of blood on the plastic, and the thick, heavy material.

He's covered in blood from head to toe, he can feel the weight of it through his clothes, and across every inch of exposed skin

None of it is his, it's all that remains of three special forces soldiers, literally torn to pieces right next to him. In less than a second, in the darkness of the basement, between one breath and the next. He'd dragged himself out, back into the light, after waking up half curled into a wall with his head ringing, half-drowning in what had been left of his team. It feels like he's been slapped with blood, it's still warm and grotesque, but drying on his skin now, drying into one cracking layer of gore, and he's shaking even as his boots skid on the tiles.

It's all he can smell and taste, every time he breathes, and he's amazed he got back here without throwing up. His heart is thudding in his chest, and it's against all sense that _that_ makes his reactions slower, clumsier than they should be.

He can't get anything off, can't open a single clip or lace, or zip, all he's doing is painting red around, breath going thin in frustration and horror.

His shoulder thuds into a locker, tips him sideways and leaves the grey surface spattered with red.

"Jesus fucking christ." The words jar, though not as much as the hand that sways into view and then stops an inch away from touching him.

Captain Tom Ryan seems to fill the locker room from end to end. He's everything Nick can see from under his wet lashes and he looks, for one brief moment, horrified. And then he's just Captain Ryan again, serious and competent and efficient. Nick reaches for him like he's the only thing that's real. He tries to speak, to explain, to give some sort of report about what exactly happened, because clearly _someone_ has to know, _Ryan_ has to know.

His voice sounds strange and muffled, he can only hear every fourth word he's speaking around the buzzing and the wet taste of blood that trickles over the edge of his lip and into his mouth.

He stops, spits on reflex and nearly falls.

Ryan risks a hand on the tacky arm of his jacket.

"Take a breath, all that can wait just take a breath," Ryan says calmly. Nick does, obediently, but all it does is fill his mouth with the taste of blood and make his head swim.

Ryan is talking to someone behind then, he can hear the words, he _knows_ the words but it's almost as if his mind is refusing to concentrate on them. That instead it's leaving him in that buzzing place that tastes of blood.

His hand is on Ryan's arm then, for no reason he can fathom.

Captain Ryan's hands start off clean when they unclip his belt, the holster laid round his thigh, but it isn't long before his fingers are smeared crimson, collecting more wherever they press, wherever they touch Nick's clothes. And he's swallowing furiously and tipping his head back so he doesn't have to look at it while Ryan pulls at the zip of his jacket, shoving it off of his shoulders. It slides down and hits the floor with a wet sound, dead weight.

Ryan doesn't stop there but pulls his shirt up his chest in wet, tacky slides. When it goes over his head, it flings droplets out of his hair, droplets that sprinkle the tiles under his booted feet and the wall next to him, shocking red dots on white.

He stares at them dizzily for a long second.

"Cutter...Nick?"

Nick looks down. Ryan's crouched in front of him, a bizarre mathematical puzzle of height and weight filling such a small space. There's a line of red on his cheek, strangely colourful on Ryan's serious face.

Ryan has a hand folded round one of his boots and he awkwardly lifts it, lets him take the whole thing away, and then the other.

He doesn't stop there

Nick tells Ryan that he can do that himself.

Though then he doesn't move for a long moment so maybe he can't?

Ryan does it for him.

"Step back," Ryan says quietly, and for a second Nick has no idea whatsoever what that means. Until Ryan catches hold of his waist, and very slowly steers him backwards; between the two tiled walls.

Ryan leans away, moves the taps on the wall next to him.

Nick takes a quick, startled breath when water hits him, a shade away from comfortably warm.

It pours over his head and down, a sheet of pink that's no less rich with that hard metallic scent as it pales and flows down the drain.

Ryan's hand is on his head, very carefully tipping him in the spray. A quick vicious stab of pain where Ryan's fingers drift suggests some of the blood may actually have been his after all.

Though how much, how badly....he doesn't seem to have enough sense left to wonder, or worry about that. He must have made some noise because Ryan's hand is easier on the second slide. Only hardening as it reaches the back of his neck, twists him again.

He doesn't say a word about the blood, doesn't say anything, even though Nick came back alone.

"I'm sorry," Nick manages through the water, slurred and unsteady. "I wasn't -"

"You need to get to medical after this," Ryan says quietly, and he looks so serious that for a second Nick's heart thumps in his chest, a second away from reacting to what isn't, in fact, an order.

His heart's beating too fast, and he has his hands in Ryan's shirt without realising it, dry material under his fingers, warm and crumpling under his wet fingers.

Water runs off of Ryan's mouth in slow motion, and Nick can't resist pulling on the loose end of fabric he holds, can't resist stretching up on his toes and finding that river of water. It's warmer than it looks, warmer still where it runs inside Ryan's mouth and Nick can't resist following it. His fists crush wet material, though his pull does little to shift the monument that is Ryan. He's aware, in some dizzy distant way, that he's naked, that he's pressed close enough to soak what little of Ryan has escaped the fall of water, kit and uniform scratchy and unfamiliar under his skin, where he presses in from hips to chest.

He wonders if Ryan can taste blood?

Ryan's hand is briefly on the side of his face, a flicker of pressure on wet skin, before it moves up, pushes his hair back, a strange unexpected gesture that makes Nick fall away from him. His fingers go still in the soaking material of Ryan's shirt and then fall free.

He looks up.

"Just breathe," Ryan says quietly.

So he does.


End file.
